Thursday, July 20, 2017

Fake news? Don't get mad. Get facts -- July 20, 2017 column

A Facebook friend
shared a quote the other day purportedly from Vice President Mike Pence on Fox
News.

Americans need more
“Jesus care” not health care, because if people went to church, they’d be healed
and wouldn’t need doctors, according to Pence.

The post soon sparked
plenty of angry comments. Almost as quickly, though, someone linked to an article
by the independent fact-checking site Snopes.com. The quote was wholly
fabricated.

Snopes rated the post “False”
with a big red X, explaining the image macro, a picture with text, surfaced in
May on Fox News the Facebook Page, which used a Fox News logo and lampooned Fox
News, but was totally unrelated to Fox News.

The Facebook page
appears to have been taken down, but everything is immortal on the internet.

It was heartening to
see the fabrication identified and neutralized so rapidly. Perhaps someone
thought the quote squirrely – it was ungrammatical – but instead of moving to
the popular video of the dog saving the fawn looked into the quote and found the
facts.

That’s what we should
do: Check out stories designed to make us mad, find the truth and share it. Fake
news is an equal opportunity liar. So, whatever our personal political
leanings, we all benefit when sunshine kills the germs.

Facebook is taking
steps to combat fake news, but the perps are likely to find ways around changes.
That’s why policing social media is up to us.

It’s also heartening to
see news organizations persevere in debunking President Donald Trump’s brags
and myths – and he has noticed.

“We’ve signed more
bills – and I’m talking about through the legislature – than any president
ever,” Trump said Monday at the White House.

“For a while, Harry
Truman had us, and now I think we have everybody. . . I better say `think,’
otherwise they’ll give me a Pinocchio. And I don’t like those; I don’t like
Pinocchios,” Trump said.

The Washington Post’s
fact-checkers award up to four Pinocchios for falsehoods.

Pinocchio-anxiety
notwithstanding, Trump was still way off on his numbers. He lags behind Truman
and several other presidents in bills signed to date, the Post fact-checkers reported,
but they gave no Pinocchios for that flirtation with falsehood.

“He certainly appeared
to pause for a moment and wonder if he was right. For Trump, that’s a step in
the right direction,” the Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote.

Trump dismisses any
news and news outlets he dislikes as fake news.

But fake news is
intentional deceit, or as The New York Times put it, “pure fiction masquerading
as truth.” Trump more often labels as fake news truth that makes him look bad.

Trump’s long-running
war on the news media may yet backfire. Americans’ confidence in newspapers is
actually up from last year, the Gallup organization reported last month.

To be sure, it’s nothing
to brag about. Just 27 percent of people said they had confidence in newspapers
-- but that was up 7 percentage points from a year earlier. Baby steps.

People actually have more confidence in news on the internet than in
Congress -- 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively, even though the internet
is a fake news incubator.

The mainstream news media
aren’t perfect by any means, but when they get it wrong, the incidents are
painful. Three CNN staffers resigned last month after the network retracted a
story about alleged ties between Russia and a Wall Street financier who is a Trump
ally. On Friday, Trump named the financier, Anthony Scaramucci, a tough critic of the news media, White House communications director. (Updated 7.21.17)

But there’s a
difference between mistakes and deliberate lies. Fake news can have dangerous
consequences.

Last December, a gullible
28-year-old man in North Carolina drove 350 miles to investigate internet reports
of a child sex ring connected to the Clinton campaign in a Washington pizza
restaurant.

He fired an AR-15 in the
restaurant -- only to learn he had been misled. There were no endangered
children, much less a sex ring. His loaded weapons were real, though, and could
have caused real tragedy.

Stopping fake news may
be impossible, but we all must do what we can to expose it. The stakes are too
high.